We were now in a sunken hot steaming tub of water, to get the shit washed off (none had gotten on me, thanks to the late Fred Noonan’s warning). This was also Suzuki’s way of rewarding Jesus Sablan for defending the chief’s honor. Jesus was clearly the only Chamorro in this brothel, and I’d noticed the chief placing a fat handful of funny money in the madam’s palm, doing some quick whispered explaining to her while nodding in Jesus’s direction.
As we relaxed in the steaming water, sipping glasses of awamori, a potent mullet brandy, the chief—whose body was smoothly scrawny—said to his associate, “I send for new clothing. I ask shakufu burn dishonored clothes.”
I gathered shakufu referred to that barmaid madam who’d walked us back here.
Lord Jesus said nothing—his eyes were wide and moving side to side as he luxuriated in the steaming, scented, oil-pooled water, in what was obviously a new experience for him; hell, maybe bathing itself was a new experience for him. He was a curious combination of brawn and fat, cords of sinew alternating with flaps of flab, his heavily muscled outspread arms surrounding half the tub.
Then the chief turned his gaze upon me. “With pilot dead, is Amira lost?”
“Only if you tell her the truth about his death,” I said, matter-of-factly. “I believe you can still count on her cooperation.”
Lord Jesus, leaning back limply with his glass of awamori in hand, had an expression of bliss, his eyes half-shut, his mouth open in moronic ecstasy. I wondered if he’d worn a similar expression when he pressed the glowing red tip of a cigarette to Amy’s gentle throat.
“Pilot die dengue fever?” Suzuki suggested.
“Hai,” I said, smiling, nodding, as if this were a brilliant notion.
Water had gotten on his gray mustache and it was dripping down his smile. “You tell her for us? Make her believe?”
“You honor me with this mission,” I said. “I am sorry I failed with the pilot. I will not fail again.”
“No apology,” Suzuki said. “Barbarian pilot is better dead. Deal with woman now.”
“I can tell you, as an American, that the woman’s value to your country, alive, would far outweigh the alternative.”
Suzuki frowned, not understanding. “All-turn…?”
“Kill her,” Lord Jesus said.
I wasn’t sure whether he was explaining the meaning of what I’d said, or making his own suggestion.
Soon three slender geishas had padded in, stepped from their cheap faded rayon kimonos and slippers, and slipped down into the tub, where they began washing us.
“If you have religion problem,” the chief said, apparently noting that I was ill at ease, “please to say.”
“Actually, yes,” I said. Normally I wouldn’t have minded a Madam Butterfly soaping my privates, even if I did seem to have drawn a somewhat withered flower. I had a feeling Saipan was where Tokyo shipped their aging talent.
“If you don’t mind,” I said, putting my barely touched glass of awamori down, “I’ll walk back to the hotel. Any man’s death is troubling to a man of the cloth.”
The chief nodded solemnly; he had regained considerable dignity since the shit got cleaned off his face. Lord Jesus was lost in the nirvana of a massage from a geisha whose ability to hide her distaste was miraculous.
I smiled at my geisha, trying to send her a message that my rejection of her charms wasn’t personal, and she smiled back with a sadness in her eyes as old as her country. As I climbed out, she brought me towels and a robe.
Drying off, I said to the chief, “I’ll talk to the woman tonight, and report to you tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” Chief Suzuki said with a respectful nod. “Konichiwa.”
I exited the brothel into a late afternoon that had turned ugly and cold, under a rolling, growling charcoal sky. Gunmetal waves were splashing up over the concrete jetty; a trio of immense freighters anchored in the harbor took the rough waters stoically, but fishing sampans tied to a concrete finger of a pier seemed almost to jump out of the water. This was not good. But it would not stop me. Turning up the collars of my priestly black suitcoat, I walked against the wind, the hotel only a few blocks away.
This time when I knocked, the door opened right now and there she was, standing before me, blue-gray eyes at once shiny with hope and red with despair, mouth quivering as if not quite daring to smile, hoping I’d returned with the foolproof plan that would liberate Fred Noonan and send us all happily home.
But she knew me too well; she knew the little smile I gave her did not bode well.
“Oh my goodness…”
She took a step back as I moved into the room, which had turned dark and cool with the afternoon; she still wore the short-sleeve mannish white shirt and rust slacks, her feet bare. I shut the door, as she asked, “You can’t help him?”
I took her arm, gently, and walked her to the chair by the window, which she had lowered, but not all the way, the cool wind sneaking in to riffle the covers, the pages, of the magazines on the table, colorful images of smiling Japanese.
Kneeling before her, like a suitor, I enfolded her hands in mine, gazed at her with all the tenderness I could summon and said, “No one can help him now. Amy, they executed Fred this afternoon.”
She didn’t say anything, but outside the wind howled in pain; her chin quivered, tears trickled. Slowly, she shook her head, her eyes hooded with grief.
“That’s why they wanted me to talk to him,” I said, patting her hand. “To give him Last Rites.”
A spattering of rain had begun; filmy curtains reached out in ghostly gesture.
She swallowed. “How? Was it…quick?”
“It was quick,” I said. “They shot him in his cell, right in front of me. Couldn’t do a damn thing…I’m so sorry.”
My lies softened the blow only slightly; but she mustn’t know the sacrifice he made, and had to be spared the grotesque details of his death.
Still, she knew Noonan too well not to come close, within a consonant actually, saying, “I bet he spit in their eye.”
“Oh yes.”
“Nathan…it hurts.”
Still kneeling, I held out my arms to her, like Jolson singing “Swanee,” and she tumbled into my embrace and we kind of switched around so that I was sitting in the chair, she was in my lap like a big kid, grabbing tight, face buried in my neck, the tears turning from trickle to downpour, as outside the sky imitated her.
We were like that for several minutes, and then the rain was coming in, so I eased her to her feet, and walked her to the padded quilts, where she sat, slumping. I closed the window, leaving an inch for air, switched on the reading lamp, whose translucent tan shade created a golden glow. Sick of playing priest, I removed the suitcoat, and the clerical-collared shirt, and in my T-shirt went over and sat beside her. Our legs were stretched out laxly before us, our arms hung loose, puppets whose strings had been snipped.
She was staring into nothing at all. “He suffered so. They were so terribly cruel to him…it makes me…”
And she covered her face and began to weep, sobs racking her body. I put my arm around her, patting her back as if comforting a child, but I knew there was nothing I could say or do. Could I even understand what she was going through? Could anyone, except Fred Noonan?
Finally she looked at me with wide red-rimmed eyes, her lightly powdered face streaked with tears, and said, “I feel so guilty. Nathan. So guilty…I’ve had it so easy, compared to Fred.”
“Nothing to feel guilty about,” I assured her. “It was out of your control.”
“I didn’t fight them, like he did. He was brave. I was a coward.”
“You were in prison, too.”
She shook her head, no, violently, no. “Not like him. Not like him.”
“Well, he’s free now. Be happy for him.”
She blinked some tears away. “You really look at it that way?”
“I saw how he was living. He was glad to go. Believe me. Wherever he is, it has to be a
better place than that.”
Thinking that over, she lay down, resting her head in my lap, pulling her knees up, like a fetus, and I stroked that curly head of hair while she quietly cried and snuffled and even slept for a few minutes.
Finally, with her head still in my lap, she looked up and asked, “Can we really get out of here?”
“Yes. The schooner that brought me here, the Yankee, is anchored out beyond the three-mile limit. They’ve spent the day waiting to see if I’ll need a lift home tonight—the captain and his first mate’ll come in, in their motor launch, and pull up on the other side of that little island just off the waterfront—Maniagawa—and watch for me.”
“When?”
“When else? Midnight.”
Two escape routes had been arranged for me: Captain Johnson and his dinghy, tonight; or if I needed more time, in two days (as I’d told the shichokan), passage was arranged with a German trader. If I missed both my rides, I’d be on my own, though with Guam so nearby, a hijacked motorboat remained a viable third option.
“Is this rain going to be a problem?” she wondered.
The storm was rattling the window.
“It could be a help,” I said. “What fools but us will be out in it?”
She sat up. Hope was back in her eyes. “We’ll just…walk out of here?”
I cupped her face in my hands. “Baby, we’ll just slip out the window in my room. Don’t those native watchdogs usually camp out in the lobby?”
“Yes.”
I slipped my arm around her shoulder and drew her to me. “Well, they won’t even know we’re gone, till tomorrow morning sometime. They don’t watch the back door, ’cause there isn’t one, right?”
She nodded. “Originally, there was a side exit, but it was blocked off…this hotel is a sort of jail.”
“So they only watch the front door.”
She nodded again. “Where will your schooner captain pick us up?”
“Right on the dock. Right where he dropped me off.”
The sky cracked like a whip, then a low rumble followed.
I asked her, “Do they check on you? Bring you meals or anything?”
“They hardly bother me. I take my meals at that restaurant across the street.”
“Then all we have to do is sit tight for a few hours.”
“Well…after all, we do have some catching up to do.”
“We really do.”
“Nathan…. Turn off that light.”
“All right….”
I got up and switched off the reading lamp and when I turned she was standing beside the padded quilts, unbuttoning the white blouse; beneath it was a wispy peach bra with (she revealed as she unzipped the rust trousers) matching silky step-ins. Her flesh took on cool tones of blue, as the reflected rain streaking down the window projected itself onto the walls, shadow ribbons of darker blue making abstract flowing patterns along the lanky curves of her body. She undid the bra and let it fall, baring the small, girlishly pert breasts, then stepped from the step-ins, standing naked, shoulders back, unashamed, legs long and lean and even muscular, clothing pooled at her bare feet, her slender shapely body painted with the textures of the storm, arms held out to me beseechingly.
It was time for Father O’Leary to take his pants off.
We made love tenderly, we made love savagely, we made up for lost time and laughed and wept, and when she rode me, her preferred posture, strong-willed woman that she was, her ivory body washed in the blue shadows of the streaky rain, she made love with an abandon and joy that she otherwise must have found only in the sky. I will never forget her lovely face hovering above me, gazing down with heartbreaking fondness, her face bright with joy, then lost in passion, drunk with sensation, and finally aglow with the bittersweet sense of loss fulfillment exacts.
Later, since we were after all in an unlocked room in the political “hotel” of our hosts, Father O’Leary and a fully clothed Amira sat on the quilts in the cool blue reflection of the rain coming down. A pitcher of water poured into her basin had allowed us to wash up and she mentioned that this current rain was welcome.
“Rainwater’s important here,” she said. “The ground water on this island has an awful, brackish taste.”
“I thought it rained every time you turn around, in the tropics.”
“We don’t get much in the summer, but winter monsoon season is pretty fierce. Lots of frequent, short showers.”
I wondered if she realized she spoke of Saipan almost as her home? And hadn’t it been, for almost three years?
“This is shaping up like a typhoon,” she said, looking toward the window. The shadows on the walls were darker, moving more quickly, and the wind sounded angry. The direction of the rain seemed to have shifted, coming down straighter, hitting the tin roof of the one-story house next door in hard pellets, unrelenting liquid machine gun fire.
She asked me questions about home, pleased that Paul Mantz had remarried (“That Terry is a terrific gal”); I gave her more details on her husband’s remarriage, which only seemed to wryly amuse her, now. She had no idea her disappearance had been the center of such worldwide attention and seemed rather flattered, even touched. Bitterly, though, she commented that the multimillion-dollar naval search must have largely been an excuse to pry in these waters.
She also spoke of her life in Saipan, which was very solitary. Other than Chief Suzuki, Jesus Sablan, and a few officials, like the shichokan, she knew of no one in Garapan who spoke fluent English, and—despite her ability to traverse the downtown—she had made few friends.
“The Chamorro family next door,” she said, pointing toward the window, and the rat-a-tat-tat tin-roof rainfall, “has been kind.” She laughed softly. “I got to know them on my trips to the privy…it’s in back of their house. They have a little girl, Matilda, maybe twelve, a sweet thing. She knows some English, and I tried to help her with her homework, now and then. I gave her a ring with a pearl as a keepsake…. Her parents are nice, too, they give me fresh fruit, pineapples, mangoes, which is something I can’t find at the Japanese market. Food’s awful—everything’s out of a can or a jar.”
“I noticed,” I said with a smile.
The room turned white from lightning, and the thunderclap was like cannon fire.
“Are you sure this rain won’t be a problem?” she asked. “For us leaving tonight?”
“No, it’s helpful,” I lied. “Listen…it’s getting close to time. I’m going down and check on the chumps in the lobby…. You better look around this room and see if there’s anything you want to take with you.”
Her laugh sounded like a cough. “I don’t think I’ll be looking back on this room with much nostalgia.”
“Well, look over your personal items, things you brought with you…wrap up a little bundle, if you have to, but travel light.”
She smirked. “Don’t worry.”
“I’ll go down and distract the fellas…. Wait maybe a minute after I leave, then go down to my room and slip inside.”
She nodded.
I was almost out the door when she clutched my arm. I leaned over and kissed her. “We’re gonna be apart for two, maybe three minutes,” I said. “Think you can bear up?”
She shook her head, no; she was smiling but her eyes were moist. “I’m afraid.”
“Good. That’s healthy. Only the dead are fearless.”
“Like Fred.”
“Like Fred,” I said, and touched her face, and stepped into the hallway.
It was empty. My hunch was the entire floor was vacant, except for Amy. The only other person I’d seen who seemed to be staying here was the desk clerk or the manager or whoever he was, who had the first room off the little lobby. I moved down the stairs, and through another empty hallway.
In the lobby, the check-in desk was unoccupied, and the ceiling fan whirred sluggishly over two Chamorro assistant coppers in their threadbare white suits. I knew them both: fatso Ramon, of the cantaloupe head and blankly s
tupid countenance, was seated in the rattan chair where Jesus had been previously plopped; and across from him was the short, burly officer who Suzuki had brought in to sub for Jesus. They were playing cards, of course, with what seemed to be the same greasy deck. Billy clubs and matchsticks again littered the rattan coffee table.
“Where’s Jesus?” I asked Ramon.
“Paint town red,” Ramon grinned. It wasn’t as nasty as Jesus’s grin but it was nasty enough.
“Oh, he’s still out with the chief?”
Ramon nodded, fat fingers holding the smeary cards close to his face, eyes almost crossing as he studied his hand.
Then I asked the burly character, who had a lumpy sweet-potato nose and pockmarks (though the latter weren’t nearly in Jesus Sablan’s league), if he knew how to play Chicago. His grasp of English was obviously less than that of Ramon, who having played a few hands with me this afternoon, frowned at my apparent interest in joining them.
“No!” Ramon said. “No play. Go hell.”
This rebuff was fine with me. I didn’t really want to play cards with these wild boars; I was just keeping them busy long enough for Amy to slip down the stairs and into my room.
Which, a few seconds later, was exactly where I found her, wearing her weathered wrinkled flying jacket, pacing and holding her stomach; my room seemed darker than hers, perhaps because my window onto the house next door did not overlook its rooftop.
“I feel sick,” she said. “Sick to my stomach, like before going onstage to give a stupid lecture….”
I was digging the nine-millimeter out of my travel bag. “Do you get butterflies before you take off in a plane?”
“Never.”
I checked the chamber; the bolt action made a nasty echoey click. “Well, this is more like takin’ off on a flight than giving a lecture. So tell your stomach to take it easy.”
She sucked in air, nodded.
Now, if only my belly would take that same good advice.
Flying Blind Page 33